Karl Shapiro

Biography of Karl Shapiro

Karl Shapiro attended the University of Virginia before World War II, and immortalized it in a scathing poem called "University," which noted that "to hate the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum." He did not return after his military service.

Karl Shapiro wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.)

Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, house flies, and drug stores as worthy of attention. Later work experimented with more open forms, beginning with The Bourgeois Poet (1964) and continuing with White-Haired Lover (1968). The influence of Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams is evident in his work.

Shapiro's interest in formal verse and prosody led to his writing a long poem about the subjects, Essay on Rime (1945); A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948); and, with Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (1965; reissued 2006).

Selected Poems appeared in 1968, and Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (1971) and a three-part autobiography, "Poet" (1988-1990).

Shapiro edited the prestigious magazine, Poetry (see Poetry Magazine) for several years, and he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he edited Prairie Schooner, and at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired in the mid-1980s.

His other works include Person, Place and Thing (1942), (with Ernst Lert) the libretto to Hugo Weisgall's opera The Tenor (1950), To Abolish Children (1968), and The Old Horsefly (1993). Shapiro received the 1969 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, sharing the award that year with John Berryman.

Karl Shapiro Poems

Manhole Covers
The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,

California Winter
It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what

A Garden In Chicago
In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,
I lay in a garden of such dusky green
It seemed the dregs of the imagination.
Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence

The Olive Tree
Save for a lusterless honing-stone of moon
The sky stretches its flawless canopy
Blue as the blue silk of the Jewish flag
Over the valley and out to sea.

Going To School
What shall I teach in the vivid afternoon
With the sun warming the blackboard and a slip
Of cloud catching my eye?

Buick
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,

The Conscientious Objector
The gates clanged and they walked you into jail
More tense than felons but relieved to find
The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped

The Alphabet
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,

The Fly
O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk

Sunday: New Guinea
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,
The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,
From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,

Troop Train
It stops the town we come through. Workers raise
Their oily arms in good salute and grin.
Kids scream as at a circus. Business men

The Piano Tuner’s Wife
That note comes clear, like water running clear,
Then the next higher note, and up and up
And more and more, with now and then a chord,

University
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum. In mid-September
The entering boys, identified by hats,

The Dome Of Sunday
With focus sharp as Flemish-painted face
In film of varnish brightly fixed
And through a polished hand-lens deeply seen,